4 Innovations Keeping Air Travel Safe

Those things are all more likely to kill you than a plane crash. There’s no logical reason to fear flying. We’ve all seen the statistics: The chances of being in a plane wreck are infinitesimal. In fact, research by the National Transportation Board in 2001 shows that even if you somehow are so unlucky as to be aboard a plane that has an accident, your chances of surviving are north of 95 percent.

Even so, for anxious fliers, the odds do little to quell nerves, and moderate turbulence leads to white-knuckling the arm rests. But it’s not just luck that so few wrecks occur, or that the scant accidents rarely result in any fatalities. Rather, it's because modern aircraft have thousands of precautionary technologies in place that escape the everyday traveler’s awareness—such as these four under-the-radar safety features.

Fire-Proof Seat Cushions

In the early 1980s, the Federal Aviation Administration commissioned NASA to determine which type of seat cushioning materials would be most flame-retardant in the event of an in-cabin fire. Today, to pass the FAA’s “Oil Burner Test for Seat Cushions,” aircraft manufacturers wrap advanced fire-blocking fabrics around seat cushions, thus acting as a protective layer. Foam company Aerofoam Industries even weaves Kevlar in with its proprietary yarns.

Mountain Sensors

Controlled Flight Into Terrain (CFIT) accidents are a category of crash in which an airborne plane accidentally collides with the landscape—mountains, ocean, the ground. A 1999 report by Boeing attributed more than 9,000 plane crash deaths to CFITs (such accidents are often the result of poor visibility conditions) since the beginning of commercial jet operations, and in 2000 the FAA began to require all U.S. passenger planes to be equipped with Terrain Awareness Warning Systems (TAWS). Advanced devices now monitor aircraft’s elevation, speed, and angle for specific red flags such as dangerously close terrain clearance or an extreme descent rate, and will warn the pilot via audio or visual messages. (See how TAWS work in this video from Honeywell.)

Pilot Fatigue Monitoring

In a 2013 survey of 500 pilots by the British Airline Pilots’ Association, 56 percent admitted to having fallen asleep while piloting a plane, with 29 percent revealing they’d awoken to find the other pilot asleep as well. As such, software designed to keep your captain roused and vigilant is becoming more widespread. The Boeing Alertness Model, for example, will sound an alarm if a certain amount of time elapses without anyone touching the controls—and the associated app CrewAlert Pro allows pilots and airlines to predict fatigue based on factors like upcoming flight schedule, time zone shifts, and self-reported sleep journals.

Power-Generating Windmills

In the very rare occurrence that an aircraft loses all power mid-flight, many modern planes are furnished with a small propeller that deploys from either a wing or the fuselage. Known as a Ram Air Turbine (RAT), this device functions as a windmill, using the airstream to spin the propeller. The turbine generates just enough power for key systems required to control the plane and then land it. (This video shows an Emirates flight landing on RAT-generated power.)